I guess y’all are having a drought, and your farmers are worried. I sympathize, and I do hope you get some good healthy summer storms soon. But, well, your governor is a dufus.
With the state’s weather forecasters not delivering much-needed rain, Gov. Bob Riley on Thursday turned to a higher power. The governor issued a proclamation calling for a week of prayer for rain, beginning Saturday.
Riley encouraged Alabamians to pray “individually and in their houses of worship.”
“Throughout our history, Alabamians have turned in prayer to God to humbly ask for his blessings and to hold us steady during times of difficulty,” Riley said. “This drought is without question a time of great difficulty.”
Shhh. I’m going to tell you two secrets.
One: prayer doesn’t work. Never does. Besides, if it’s Georgia putting a curse on you, they outvote you in God’s eyes.
Two: when I lived in Eugene, we used to make trips to Bend, Oregon to vacation — they always advertise about how they only get like 8 days of rain a year. It always rained when we visited. Therefore, if you really want it to rain, you ought to fly me in and parade me around the state. I have big rain ju-ju.
I’m sure we can come up with lots of incantations and rituals that various cultures have invented to conjure rain. You should try them all. It can’t hurt, after all.
PZ, I’m guessing anyone who both lives in Alabama and reads this blog already knows their governor is a dufus. ;^)
idiot…you have to dance to bring rain
Can’t he even be original? John Howard already tried this in Australia.
Everyone in the state should wash their cars. Or maybe this only works with MY car, and I would have to drive to Alabama and wash my car there for it to work. Not happening, by the way.
Reminds me of Douglas Adams’s rain god, the perpetually bitter trucker who had been continually rained on for 15 years or so, no matter where he went. “Forget about irrigating the Sahara,” one media type said after he went public, the man was destined for a career in avoiding places for money. (Sounds like blackmail to me, but hey.) Amusingly enough, one piece of evidence for his godhood was the time he went to visit his cousin in America… Seattle, more specifically.
Ha ha, this made me think of a character in Douglas Adams ‘Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul’. The book is about Norse gods who have lost their way in contemporary society. The character is a trucker who doesn’t know he is the Norse god of rain. The rain clouds follow him around trying to make him happy, and he complains about how it is always raining, no where he goes.
Does the governor have a virgin daughter that can be sacrificed to appease the Raingiver?
Cyrus beat me to it!
It can hurt. It can hurt the public image of… wait, what are we talking about? Alabama? Oh… well then, you’re right, it can’t hurt.
I think the correct spelling is “doofus.” Otherwise, I agree completely. I grew up in Alabama, & this kind of nonsense is one of roughly 15,976,243 reasons why I will never move back there.
You should just introduce them to cricket. Works a charm.
Bob
I think they should check out what prayers the people of Marble Falls, Texas are using.
Not only that, flounder, you got the wrong book. The Rain God is in So Long, and Thanks For All The Fish.
I live in New Orleans. Listening to the public officials on the radio before Katrina hit us, I recall them asking us to pray. That brilliant plan didn’t work out too well either.
Ah, if you pray for rain, it will rain…eventually. Prayer is also effective for making the sun rise in the morning.
He showed up in Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul? I seem to remember him from So Long and Thanks For All the Fish. Was he in both?
The Rain God only gets a bit part in So Long, and Thanks For All The Fish . The Rain God recieves a somewhat longer treatment in The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul.
PZ: Be sure to charge a LOT of money for your services. You too car-washing guy. If you’re going to sell snake oil, make it PRICEY effin snake oil. Only way to go! Sheesh, the religious/new age dopes do it all the time.
it’s a cant-lose situation for the christians though, let’s face it, it’s gonna rain someday, maybe months after the prayer week but still god will get the credit.
I live in Birmingham, Alabama.
“[Y]our governor is a dufus.”
I’d argue that he understands the electorate all too well. For an enlightening (depressing) peek under the rock, check out the forums on http://www.al.com/forums/, or simply read the letters to the editor of the Birmingham News. They’re always good for a laugh, until you remember that you share the region with the people who wrote them.
If it does happen to rain anytime soon, the Gov will trumpet it as a proof of the power of prayer. If it doesn’t, the prayer week will be quietly forgotten.
Unfortunately, whenever they finally get rain, they’ll start dancing around, clapping, praising their imaginary master and feeling powerful for coercing him into doing something he hadn’t planned to do, not realizing that it was going to rain anyway, whether they prayed for it or not.
Also, I think you can buy rain at Wal-Mart now.
When I was a kid living in Glasgow, Scotland, friends of the family used to ask us when we were going on vacation so they could arrange theirs for another time.
They were joking… I think.
It takes some doing to develop a reputation as rainmakers in a place like Glasgow, believe me!
I didn’t realize you lived in Eugene. We got some great rain yesterday. When I was in Bend last week, though, it was sunny every day. It appears I am the anti-Pharyngula. I best stay away from Alabama lest I be smitten down by the governor’s righteous fury.
The lead of the first sentence “With the state’s weather forecasters not delivering much-needed rain…” is also priceless. As if meteorologists were somehow responsible for the lack of rain.
How about declaring that every day of the week be called Saturday?
Hey, so far as things to pray about, the weather is probably one of the least damaging. Its not like there is something more useful they can do about the lack of rain.
Keeping Alabama busy and out of trouble can’t be anything but a boon to the rest of the country.
I agree with Poor Howard. I use the word often in self-reference, and it’s “doofus.”
He’s not praying for rain. He’s angling for votes.
…
…
I hearby christen this the Argumentum ad Gubernatorium*:
The Governor speaks of praying to God.
The Governor knows more than I do about everything.
Therefore, God exists.
…
If it’s a Deep South state, land of the peanut, should it be spelled “goobernatorium”?
*Variation on the “argument from authority.”
…
…
“Also, I think you can buy rain at Wal-Mart now.”
Yeah, but it’s cheap, Chinese-made rain. Probably contaminated too- you should probably avoid using it to fill your dog’s water bowl.
I have big rain ju-ju.
You guys, always bragging.
If they’re doling out guns, they will also have to provide bullet-proof vests (if there’s going to be a shootout, better be protected), and a handy on-campus practice firing range, and day-long defensive wounding/killing classes…
I live and teach in Alabama.
You can laugh all you want. Dover is in PA, Ken Ham is in KY, ICR is in CA, Kent Hovind is in (jail) in FL, the Discovery Institute is in Seattle WA (your precious hometown PZ) – do I need to go on, or do you get the point?
The vast majority of Americans in ALL states believe in a personal God who answers prayers. So, you can all laugh at me all you want – you’re soaking in it too.
Whoops, wrong thread!
llewelly:
I’m afraid you’ve got that backward. Arthur Dent meets Rob McKenna, unwitting Rain God, early on in So Long; the “longer treatment” begins at that point, and then McKenna reappears later in the novel.
In contrast, Long Dark only has a passing reference to a “God of Rain,” and there is no mention in that book of Rob McKenna, a truck-driving deity, or a person who has an unwitting connection to precipitation.
Go ahead–look it up.
Plus, with how bad your governor is dumbing down your schools, we’ve started calling you “Minnebama” over here in the Utopia of Wisconsin.
I live in an area hit by Katrina and have relatives in Alabama. I have been told that the community, where my relatives live, is praying for a hurricane to relieve the drought. I’m just glad prayer doesn’t work. So much for christian compassion.
And of course Seattle gets less annual rainfall than Dallas, or NYC, or lots of other places all over the US. And where I live in Oak Harbor, north of Seattle by about 70 miles, we get even less.
When I lived in Oklahoma several years back we had a drought. When it finally rained it was amazing how many signs all around the area praised god for the rain. Every church sign had the praise, but so did business signs. Um, people, if your god caused the rain, don’t you think he caused the drought? Why aren’t you thanking (or cursing) him for that, eh?
And then when I attended a county council meeting here in Florida while a hurricane churned off the coast trying to determine where to make landfall, a preacher did the invocation at the beginning of the meeting and had the audacity to pray for the hurricane to go somewhere else. He didn’t pray for it to break up or head back out to sea. He actually prayed for it to miss us and land in someone else’s backyard. I never bow my head during these invocations, so I was looking around in amazement to see other people nodding their heads in agreement with this idiot and saying “amen.” I was … dumbstruck by the idiocy and nerve!
I’m having some rain shipped to me from a friend in Canada. Seems they have an abundance.
How can the weather forecaster deliver rain (much-needed or otherwise)? I think that’s asking a little too much of them, don’t you?
Re: #38 and the community praying for a hurricane to end drought, and #40 praying that the hurricane will hit somebody else.
They remind me of that Seinfeld episode where FDR uses his birthday wish to wish that Kramer would die. I envision competing churches in Galveston and Pensacola, each holding marathon prayer services to ask god to hit the other with the hurricane.
Our Governor in neighboring Georgia pulled this quackery about two weeks ago. We needed the rain badly, and I was glad to see it finally fall. I just wish the downpour hadn’t come the very next day! Talk about reinforcing confirmation bias. We have had good regular rain ever since, enough that I’m ready for the Governor to stop his praying, at least on the weekend. So besides the political angle, it’s hard to blame Gov. Riley for magical thinking when Gov. Perdue has had such “success” with it.
Governor Riley is just pissed because the lack of rain means the appropriation for his secret Ark building project may be cut!
Well of COURSE the governor of Alabama thinks a week of prayer for rain is worthwhile. It worked so well earlier this month when Gov. Perdue of Georgia conducted one for his state. It went so well, in fact, that the cattle ranchers a few miles north of me are now engaged in selling off their livestock because all the grazing land has dried up and blown away.
Maybe they’ll start sacrificing goats next.
Thank you, Brian Axsmith! I live in Alabama also, and we do not have the lock on religious morons. Those of us who live here know that it is the whole country that is drowning in magical thinking.
Outstanding! Here in Mississippi, we never get to laugh at other states because we’re almost always on the bottom of whatever survey is being released (or at the top of the bad ones). But yes, these Southerners certainly do love them some Jee-zuhs.
Much as we all love to bash nutjobs and much as the idea that anyone might think praying as a *practical* option makes our teeth hurt, I can’t get too upset by this. It’s a good PR move (for *his* state, New Yorkers would laugh him out and Californians would bicker amoung themselves for months), and makes people feel good. If it rains Alabamans will slap each other on the back and think it’s a good story they can be proud of. If it doesn’t rain there won’t be any repercusions. He doesn’t look like an idiot in the eyes of the world because he isn’t spending any resources and effort into it or claiming that it *will* work. He just looks like a man with faith and home roots. Most people think that’s a good thing.
Now if he made a committee to investigate effective praying (“eyes raised or down? hands clasped in lap or steepled in front of chest? Do we allow prisoners and Jews to pray as we’re all god’s children, or will God go out of his way to thwart bad guys?”) or if after it doesn’t work he makes a dumb statement (“I just don’t understand. There must have been an unbeliever praying or some person with reasons only he can understand praying for the drought to continue”) then he’d look like a total idiot.
It’s just that the water is deeper in some areas than others. I live in Georgia, where you tell by previous comments that the water is about the same depth as Alabama. The biggest problem is that in both cases the Governors actually believe it will work. If it rains, it’s proof of God’s providence. If it doesn’t, God still answered the prayer, albeit with a ‘No’, as it wasn’t part of his master plan. Either way, god wins.
i live in birmingham, alabama. our current governor is an unabashed christian fundamentalist, and praying for rain is certainly futile in that it has no effect on the weather, but bob riley has actually been a pretty good governor in the context of alabama. he’s done a great deal for economic development, and he made a genuine, good-faith effort to reform our INCREDIBLY regressive taxation system. tax reform failed in the face of resistance by a majority of alabamians and their deeply ingrained backwardness and monied interests fighting reform, but i respect him a lot for actually trying to make alabama a better place in certain ways.
i live in birmingham, alabama.
whoever commented that alabamians who read this blog probably aren’t very sympathetic to the governor’s calls for rain prayers is correct. our current governor is an unabashed christian fundamentalist, and praying for rain is certainly futile in that it has no effect on the weather, but bob riley has actually been a pretty good governor in the context of alabama. he’s done a great deal for economic development, and he made a genuine, good-faith effort to reform our INCREDIBLY regressive taxation system. tax reform failed in the face of resistance by a majority of alabamians and their deeply ingrained backwardness and monied interests fighting reform, but i respect him a lot for actually trying to make alabama a better place in certain ways.
I can see this going horribly wrong if
A) It rains, and they take this as proof that God exists and try to force it into schools.
B) It doesn’t rain, and they blame it on homosexuals, feminists, etc.
Otherwise, let the religious Alabamians do whatever makes them happy. It’s not like there are any better ideas to make it rain, and a little hope, even if it is false hope, never hurt anybody.
Sorry for the double-post, I only clicked once, I swear. Not sure why that happened.
Alabamans obviously aren’t much for proper capitalization…;)
I, personally, prefer to refer to our dear Gov. Riley as a buffoon, but doofus is good too.
If it’s any consolation, I didn’t vote for him. Well, that’s not entirely true either, I did vote for him (for the purpose of voting against theocrat Roy Moore) in the Republican primary.
Interestingly, forecasts are calling for rain soon. They were already calling for rain before this announcement was made, so the cynics among us might think that Riley specifically intended to get the confirmation bias effect. I’m wondering if the rain comes today, will theists realize it had nothing to do with the prayers scheduled to start tomorrow, or will they think that their prayers are so effective that God travelled through time to grant their requests?
They are very welcome to some of ours – here in the UK we have had floods, and there’s more promised for the weekend.
Which is a complete pain as I am supposed to be doing a charity cycle ride.
Perhaps their prayers should be more geographically specific ?
… though I don’t think there is an Alabama in the UK – but there is a Botany Bay – they even have a cricket club !
http://www.botanybaycc.co.uk/
Our Governor in neighboring Georgia pulled this quackery about two weeks ago. We needed the rain badly, and I was glad to see it finally fall. I just wish the downpour hadn’t come the very next day!
Yea, that was me. Took the hardtop off and went for a drive down to Fort Mountain.
Don’t worry Alabamians, I’ll be driving the roadster down to the Little River Gorge this weekend. Rain will come with me.
Heh, no sooner did I post my comment, than it started raining here. Let’s see what happens next!
I used to pray for mail, and my prayers were answered often, but never on Sunday. I lost faith and gave up prayer, yet the mail still comes, although still never on Sunday. Go figure.
Seems they have an abundance.
Not my little corner, although it’s not a full on drought yet. We’ve had something like only half our usual amount.
I don’t care if it works or not, I just want some rain. Besides, even if Riley is pandering to the religious, he still isn’t as bad as Siegelman. The former gov. Don Siegelman just got sentenced to seven years in prison for corruption. A little rain dancing is a hell of a lot better than taking bribes for an Enron-esque fraud.
I’m from Alabama. Actually, the problem is that our rain all comes from Texas, and if you read the news you know that Texas has stolen all our rain. The solution is for Alabama to declare war on Texas.
In other Alabama news, our even more illustrious previous governor, Don Siegelman, is headin’ to prison.
I thought I remembered a reason why PZ was being slightly unfair to this governor, and I’m glad Brad @51 confirmed it. The gov might be a loon, but at least he seems to take seriously Jesus’s admonitions to do good for the poor. Of course, the majority of Alabama’s good Christians shot that nonsense down in flames. I imagine that, for them, there’s not much to Christianity beyond making sure that the fags cain’t git themselves hitched and the sluts cain’t git them no abortions.
PZ…
If you ever come across something so silly about my state of Oklahoma, don’t worry about offending me by laughing at it. *I* laugh at Oklahoma. It can be a very silly place.
Shortly after I moved to Utah to start my PhD studies, Salt Lake City was having considerable amounts of rain every day for close to 2 weeks. the LDS Church fathers asked the faithful to pray for the rain to stop. The next day it did not rain — it snowed. So maybe if the weather god exists this being has an interesting sense of humor.
If a hurricane hit Alabama that would be horrible, of course, but it’s hard not to think of the phrase “…be careful what you wish for…” (i.e. rain). It would be hard to suppress at least a momentary snicker, before whipping out the old checkbook, donating blood, volunteer time, whatever.
In High School & College my buddies and I used to have oodles of fun playing AD&D and being very creative with what other players “wished” for using Wish spells. We all agreed that in the AD&D universe, “Wish Lawyers” would be raking in the platinum pieces hand over fist….
If you ever come across something so silly about my state of Oklahoma, don’t worry about offending me by laughing at it. *I* laugh at Oklahoma. It can be a very silly place.
Well, Oklahoma does make it a felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison and up to a $1,000 fine to fly “any red flag or other emblem or banner, indicating disloyalty to the Government of the United States or a belief in anarchy or other political doctrines or beliefs, whose objects are either the disruption or destruction of organized government, or the defiance of the laws of the United States or of the State of Oklahoma”.
I can imagine the fun if I went to Oklahoma wearing my “Fight for your class, not your country” t-shirt.
My prayer for rain:
Dear Lord,
Please send us rain to save us from that drought you also sent.
Amen.
PZ Myers in Bend?!? Wow!! My home town was graced with your presence? Somehow the world is a happier place for me. Next time your here, I promise it won’t rain. But if it does, I’ll buy you a fresh microbrew beer.
BTW, we blame all rain that does occur on visiting Eugenites.
I think that they should do in Alabama what some pro-life freaks in Minnesota did 14 years ago. Declare a God-given drought until we stopped abortion. “It will not rain in the state of Minnesota until abortion is illegal” they said.
Started raining the next day and we had floods for several weeks in some areas.
Prayer, gotta love it.
Maybe it is “doofus,” not “dufus,” but in any case it certainly ought to be. Because, as a long-time letter carrier, I can tell you that there are actual people actually named “Dufus.”
Ahem. No I do NOT have an extensive collection of funny names of people who used to live on my route. Whydoyouask.
If I pray for rain and then my neighbor turns on his sprinkler, does that count?
Reminds me of a punchline: “No use prayin’ for rain when the wind’s in the east”.
This puts to mind an old A. J. Liebling story called The Honest Rainmaker, which chronicled the exploits of a man who made some rather nice money selling his services as a “scientific” rainmaker. How he won out and suckered a lot of apparently intelligent people is endlessly amusing.
Last year, the Mormon Church in Australia joined an interfaith effort to fast and pray for rain to stop the drought. Unfortunately, the drought is still going strong. No one at church has referred to the fast since.
PZ: “…You should try them all. It can’t hurt, after all.”
Niels Bohr: “Of course I don’t believe in it. But I understand that it brings you luck whether you believe in it or not.”
Been to Alabama…been to Minnesota. Idiots abound in both places.
Let’s bow our heads over our keyboards and pray for something more worthwhile:
Dear Geezus:
We humbly beseech ye to cause mAnn Coultergeist to choke on “her” own vomit the next time “she” purges. Also, make the hands of Defib Dick’s surgeon tremble during his cardiac surgery this summer. If you do, we might just believe in you.
Afuqingmen.
Why didn’t the doofus douchebag governor ask why his god had created the drought in the first place? What sins have the governor and the redneck farmers committed to make their god angry at them?
One word. Irrigation. Most of the entire western US is irrigated. Problem solved. Next.
Quit your praying, get up on your own two feet, and lay some pipe.
I’m from Montgomery. They still do rain dances in front of the Jerry Springer show.
I’m from Alabama, at least originally. Maybe the One True God, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, is punishing Alabama for putting “God Bless America” on His car tags?
Well, it’s been raining in the afternoons for a week now; I live in the Selma/Montgomery area. Glory!
It reminds me of stockholm syndrome. God controlls the weather. God takes away rain. People, crops, busineses suffer. God returns rain. Oh thankyouthankyouthankyouGod for returning the rain, you ARE a kind and generous god.
… and how clever to go for a week of prayer. Gives the deity a very long period over which he can claim credit for the return of rain, a few weeks I’d say.